Resolute Nazi

by Wagher, Ward

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  June 22, 1943; 11 PM

  British Naval Base HMS Highflyer

  Trincomalee Fortress

  Ceylon

  Admiral Ernest King stood on the flag deck of the USS Intrepid as the small task force slipped out of Trincomalee harbor on what he feared was a fool’s errand. The feverish efforts over the past five weeks to assemble a strike force had borne fruit. He was more confident in the combined British and American forces than he was in the intelligence they had collected.

  Admiral Forbes had managed to insert a Commando team into the Perth area with a submarine, and their radio reports indicated the Japanese were thin on the ground in Western Australia. Unless, of course, the team had been compromised. King worried that he would be sailing into a trap. Rationally he knew that the Japanese should not have been able to replace the units sunk in the Bay of Bengal in the six weeks since that battle. They had bigger problems since the Americans had been able to effect a landing on Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands.

  King was confident that the Japanese had far fewer ships than they required for their mission. Yet, so did the British and the Americans. Despite his misgivings, it looked like this was a chance to give the Japs a black eye. If they could get a foothold in Perth, the navies of both the United Kingdom and the United States would move Heaven and Earth to reinforce and expand the landing.

  The rumors of the Japanese activities, if true, made it imperative that the allied nations do whatever possible to rescue the Australian people. And King had little doubt it was true. The news out of Hawaii was horrifying. If it was a tenth as bad as the reports stated, the Japanese were going to have to pay dearly.

  King turned to his flag lieutenant. “Sam, ask Captain Duncan to join me for a cup of coffee after we clear the harbor.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral,” Lieutenant Sam Plotczyk immediately replied.

  The flag lieutenant walked over to the phone and called the captain’s steward.

  “Jeff, the Admiral wishes to take coffee with the Skipper after we clear the harbor.” He listened for a minute. “I think that would be fine. Thanks.”

  After hanging up, he walked back over to Admiral King.

  “The captain would like to meet in his sea cabin.”

  “Of course,” King responded. “That’s where I expected to meet.”

  Most officers would have withered under King’s implied rebuke, but Lieutenant Sam Plotczyk had learned not to let the admiral intimidate him. Flag officers had to be managed, or else they would not accomplish much. Plotczyk was convinced he did an outstanding job of managing Admiral King. It was by no means an easy job; however, a flag lieutenant was on a steppingstone to high rank, and Plotczyk was determined to succeed.

  An hour later, the admiral and the captain met in the captain’s sea cabin. The coffee was fresh, as were the donuts.

  “How’s the ship shaking out, Don?” King asked.

  “This is a true shakedown voyage for us, Admiral. We went through the commissioning workup in a tearing great hurry. So, there are have been more issues than I would have preferred.”

  “Anything that will impact operational efficiency?”

  “No, Sir,” Captain Duncan replied. “We have a lot of experienced officers and noncoms aboard. And we’re working the crew hard.”

  “So, you can fight the ship anytime?” King pressed.

  “Yes, Sir. We are ready in all respects. I am still planning to drill the crew intensively during the voyage. We are going to be very exposed, having only one carrier deck. I don’t want this to be the only voyage of the Galloping Ghost.”

  King smiled. “Who came up with that name?”

  “Not sure, Sir. Somebody on the crew came up with it. The full name is The Galloping Ghost of Any Coast. Considering what we are planning, I think it’s apt.”

  “That it is. Very well, Captain. Is there anything I need to deal with, or that I can help you with?”

  Duncan bit his lower lip. “Admiral, I am very uncomfortable about stripping the ship of its aircraft and leaving them in Perth. We will be mother-naked if there is another Jap task force out there.”

  “Can’t help you with that, Captain,” King snapped. “You read the operation plan. You should know better than to ask.”

  “My apologies, Admiral.”

  King glared at the skipper of the Essex. The blowtorch didn’t seem to faze Duncan.

  “Look, Don, I understand your concerns. Frankly, that decision terrified me, too.”

  “I thought you made the decision, Admiral.”

  King grinned at the captain. “I did. That doesn’t mean I had to like it. This is a high-risk operation. If anything goes wrong, our fannies will be hanging in the breeze. But we need a large enough force landed in Perth so that the Japs won’t be able to mess with it. And we don’t have enough bottoms to do it. It will be a one-shot operation. If we don’t pull it off, it’ll be a long time before we can try it again.”

  “I understand, Admiral, but I had to ask.”

  “Yeah, Don. But don’t push it, okay? I pushed this operation against my better judgment. Everybody in the JCS tried to stop it. The president heard about it and gave an explicit order to move forward. I understand the Queen was heard from, too.”

  “God, Admiral, how did you survive a contest with the JCS?”

  “If the operation fails, it won’t matter, will it?”

  Duncan tilted his head to acknowledge the statement.

  “Anything else I can help you with, Captain?”

  “No, Admiral, I think that about does it.”

  King set his coffee cup down on the table and touched Duncan’s shoulder. “In that case, try to get some sleep while you can.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral.”

  § § §

  June 23, 1943; 4 AM

  Near Aswad, Libya

  Ajeeb Saleh crept through the hole he had opened in the fence around the well and crept to the installation. The twelve-year-old boy had developed his skills at creeping around in the dark since his seventh birthday. His father never heard him leave the hovel where they lived, and probably wouldn’t care anyway.

  The Germans and Italians had been generous to his village. They had piped water to the central square and built a small pool which the villagers used to wash their laundry, and the kids used for play. So, the water was not only used for drinking, washing, and entertainment, but it allowed the planting of small gardens. The first harvest of melons had given many of the villagers their first taste of fruit.

  Since the outlanders had been so generous, most of the villagers had concluded that the strangers represented unimaginable wealth. The villagers had studied the operation and understood early on that the wells were not bringing water up from the ground. They were mining something worth the expense and trouble of piping it to Tripoli.

  Ajeeb had decided this called for some personal investigation. If there was a way to capture some of this stuff that made people wealthy, he might be able to make his family prosperous. He carried an empty wineskin made of a goat’s stomach. He planned to collect some of whatever the foreigners were mining. If he was able to gain some value from it, he thought it would be easy enough to return again at night. The guards were no longer as vigilant, so the risk was low for him.

  He carefully slipped past the walking beam of the pumpjack to the plumbing that ran from the well. The arrangement of pipes and valves puzzled him. After creeping around the installation and studying it for a few minutes, he focused on a single valve that had a short length of open pipe attached. Perhaps he could open the valve, and the stuff from the well would come out of the open pipe, and he could capture it in the wineskin. Da would be proud of him.

  He laid the wineskin down and tried to move the wheel on the head of the valve. It would not budge. He was not surprised. His slight build left him the loser in the contests of strength played by the village boys. He looked around again and spotted an iron bar. Allah was smiling down u
pon him, he thought. He scrambled over to retrieve the bar. There was not a lot of time before daylight. He needed to be finished and gone by then.

  Ajeeb fitted the iron bar into the spokes of the valve wheel and threw his weight into it. He heard a slight hiss from the pipe, but nothing appeared underneath the opening. He worked on spinning the wheel on the top of the valve further open. Unknowingly, he had opened the valve on the line bleeding natural gas from the well. The gas was colorless and did not carry an odor. As he opened the valve wider, more of the gas billowed out.

  Ajeeb wondered why he had trouble breathing. His lungs struggled to take in air, and he felt light-headed. He eventually collapsed next to the valve as the gas continued to flow, suffocating the boy. The billowing gas spread around the well site and finally reached the electric motor driving the pumpjack. The small sparks in the rotor of the pump motor were enough to ignite the cloud of gas. The resulting fireball incinerated the boy and stopped the pump. With no further gas flowing, the fire guttered out.

  The explosion blew the windows out of the offices and Stefan Gorber’s quarters. Gorber was on his feet instantly and began pulling on clothes. Vince Chase slammed open the door to his bedroom.

  “Stefan, the wellhead just blew up!”

  Gorber pushed his feet into his boots and shoved his arms into his shirt. He ran to the door and stepped out in front to look at the dying flames and the embers floating up from the wellhead. He bent over to quickly tie his boots and then started walking towards the wellhead while buttoning his shirt.

  “Stefan, wait until the crew can make sure it’s safe.”

  “It looks safe to me, Vince. The damage is already done.”

  “At least go back and get a jacket. It’s cold out here.”

  Gorber looked around. “I need to see what happened. If it’s a leak, we cannot restart production without fixing it.”

  A dozen men from the team trotted towards the wellhead. Their pay was partially dependent upon the well production, and they were motivated to keep things working.

  “Stefan,” Chase said, “let me and the workers figure out what happened. We will report to you.”

  “Oh, very well. I need to check the offices. I heard a lot of breaking glass.”

  Two hours later, Vincent Chase walked into Gorber’s office. He had swept up the broken glass from the windows and was working at his desk.

  “What do we have, Vince?”

  “We found the remains of a small boy, and one of the gas valves was open.”

  “Probably thought he could steal some oil from the line and got the wrong one,” Gorber surmised.

  “That was my thought. I sent some people to the village at first light to have them come and recover the body. I thought it might help us figure out exactly what happened.”

  “Oh, that’s pretty easy, Vince. The lad opened a gas valve, was overcome, and the motor touched off the gas.”

  “What’s the prognosis?”

  Chase frowned. “It will take us a month to repair the damage and get the well producing again.”

  “That won’t make our masters in Berlin happy. They really need the oil.”

  “I don’t have an answer for that,” Chase said.

  “I guess it is what it is. I’ll get a message off to the company headquarters. It looks the day is ruined before it has even properly begun.”

  “And we will probably have to deal with the villagers.”

  “That will just put a cap on everything.

  ”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  June 30, 1943; 9 AM

  Reich Chancellor’s Office

  Reich Chancellery

  Berlin, Germany

  Schloss studied his guest as Kirche brought the uncomfortable looking man into the office. It seemed to him that Konrad Zuse resembled the classic description of a mad scientist. Yet Zuse was probably the most under-appreciated inventor in the world at this time.

  “Please have a seat, Herr Zuse,” Schloss said. “I am getting ready to have a cup of coffee. Would you care to join me?”

  “Of course, Herr Reich Chancellor. I am honored.”

  Kirche stepped into the office carrying the coffee service on a tray along with some pastries. He carefully poured a cup for Schloss and then for Zuse. The scientist took a sip and nodded appreciatively. He then looked expectantly at Schloss.

  “I have heard some things about your work, Herr Zuse. I decided I wanted a personal conversation.”

  “I am a loyal citizen of the Reich, Herr Reich Chancellor.”

  Schloss waved a hand in a throwing away motion. “No, what I have heard was very complimentary. I wanted to get some first-hand impressions of you and your work.”

  “I am happy to tell you anything you need to know,” Zuse stammered.

  “Relax, Herr Zuse,” Schloss said, trying to reassure the man. “I think your work is important, and I would like to expand it.”

  “How so, Herr Reich Chancellor?” he asked.

  “Your machines are in use for calculating ballistic problems, is that not correct?”

  “That and also working the calculations for aerodynamic problems.”

  Schloss nodded. “Just so. And how would you describe the… I’m not sure of the word, maturity of your machines?”

  Zuse smiled slightly. “One can always improve the machines. I have the design for my Z-4 calculating machine. I have had trouble getting enough parts to build it.”

  “And what are the advantages of your Z-4?” Schloss asked.

  The scientist’s eyes lit up. “This machine will include conditional branching as well as something that we could call program control. I am developing a sort of a language that will make it much easier to instruct the machine in its tasks.”

  “And your Z3 is in operation at this time?” Schloss asked.

  “Oh, yes. As I said, we have used it to calculate aerodynamics problems. I have suggested its use to the Wehrmacht for calculation of ballistics tables.”

  “That is very interesting. What has been the response from the Wehrmacht?”

  Zuse sighed. “Unfortunately, they do not see the value of the machine. This had made it difficult to acquire parts.”

  “What kind of parts do you need?” Schloss asked.

  “My devices make use of telephone relays in the mechanism. They have given me old and used equipment.”

  “And you have made it work, though?”

  The scientist nodded. “Yes, I have some very inventive people on my team. They have made the machines work and work reliably.”

  “I am glad to hear that,” Schloss said. “I believe what you are doing is important.”

  I had never met Zuse in my other world, Schloss thought, but I believe he was never really recognized for what he achieved. It may be because he was so far ahead in the field that people did not understand what he was capable of producing.

  Schloss pondered a moment before continuing. “What do you need, Herr Zuse, to make your projects successful?”

  “Herr Reich Chancellor, new relays would save us much time that we now use to test the old equipment. And I would like to start constructing pieces of the Z4 using electron tubes. That would speed up the machine by orders of magnitude.”

  Schloss steepled his fingers as he thought. Germany was missing an opportunity here. However, the OKW was correct in limiting the funds for research because of the demands of the war. And it looked to him like he was going to have to meddle. Again.

  “Very well, Herr Zuse, here is what we will do. I will direct the OKW to release new components for the Z4. I would like you to complete the machine using the relays. It is more important that it be complete and functioning than for you to take years perfecting a computer using the electron tubes. However, I would like you to establish a small team of not more than ten people who will build a small prototype device with the electron tubes. You will demonstrate that to me and the OKW when it is complete. Do you understand what I desire?”

&
nbsp; Zuse nodded quickly. “Yes, Herr Reich Chancellor, that is very generous. Thank you.”

  “I am not doing this for you, Herr Zuse,” he snapped. “I am doing this for the Fatherland. We are in a fight for our lives. We are going to need every functioning weapon we can put our hands on to fight the Communists. Do you understand?”

  “Of course, of course!” Zuse had turned pale.

  “Very well. And I have one other question.”

  “Yes, Herr Reich Chancellor?”

  “I am not quite sure how to describe this. I understand that some combinations of silicon and germanium present electronic properties. Do you know anything about that?”

  Zuse looked puzzled. “No, I have not heard anything about it. It sounds fascinating, though. It seems to me that if something like that could replace the electronic tube, it would revolutionize what we are doing.”

  You have no idea, Herr Zuse, Schloss thought.

  “Please do this, then,” Schloss ordered, “ask around. If you can locate anybody that knows something about this, get a message to me personally about it. I will speak to them.”

  “Of course, Herr Reich Chancellor. Something like that sounds exciting.”

  “Once again, Herr Zuse, you will need to stay focused on your priorities. Let me warn you, if you cannot manage these tasks effectively and keep the Z4 on schedule, I will appoint someone to manage your group so that you can focus on the Z4.”

  “I understand, Herr Reich Chancellor. And I will see to these other items as well.”

  “Very well.” Schloss stood up, and Zuse jumped to his feet. “Thank you for coming to see me today, Herr Zuse.”

  “I am honored, Herr Reich Chancellor.”

  “Just give me the tools to fight this war.”

  The computer scientist left the office, and Kirche stepped in.

  “Is Goering in the office today?” Schloss asked.

  “He is not,” Kirche replied. “He is resting at home.”